


Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm

by Claus_Lucas



Category: Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound
Genre: Bonding, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8416468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Claus_Lucas/pseuds/Claus_Lucas
Summary: “Don’t be so hard on yourself for not saving Giygas," Jeff says. "Not everything can stay. For all its screaming and thrashing, I’m sure it wasn’t suffering at the end. You were praying for its safe passage, after all.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> paula is objectively the best character in earthbound

Paula is a volunteer nurse at the Twoson hospital and the main star of her choir class and the Polestar Preschool teacher’s assistant. She is a second mother to children that clamor for her attention with songs and arrange her name in macaroni art. She has plunged into frigid water to answer the wails of a drowning cat, sown dresses out of curtains, and folded old letters into origami roses to braid into the hair of her crying kids; she has slammed her fist into a metal enemy and didn’t even flinch when her knuckles bled, then wrapped bandages around her own broken arm while humming a nursery rhyme.

She is a girl that wanted to be everything as a child, yet she understood where she belonged, how the roots of her family tree were ingrained into the soil of her hometown and how her branches could not aspire to grow beyond those invisible borders. She saw in her mother a past, present, and future. Her first steps were taken in pursuit of that beautiful and benevolent woman that chose to dedicate her life to caring for the youngest, most fragile members of society. At the tender age of six Paula clung to her mother’s skirt and wept fervently until she was allowed to enter the world of preschool not as a student but as a teacher. Paula held an infant in her arms and felt their tiny hand grip her thumb, and immediately a tempest in her chest settled into tranquil understanding. She was smitten from the very start.

Her mother would ask, “My dearest girl, what do you wish to become once you’re grown?”

And she always had the same list of responses prepared, but she knew she must select one, so she made it her mission to test different perspectives, see what her mother thought of a daughter that could not make up her mind despite clearly being meant to inherit the family heirloom.

“A teacher,” Paula Polestar said, holding her mother’s hand, gazing into her eyes with the sort of admiration children only retain while their parents serve as the center of their universe.

“A doctor.” “A therapist.” “A policewoman.” “A service dog trainer.” “An archeologist.” “An artist, both poetic and musical.” “I want to be a choir instructor.”

Her mother would prompt her for more and Paula would suck in her breath before responding. She was gauging how vivid she could paint her fantasies without risking ruin, because despite believing that her place was there amidst the desks and the picture books, she was still a young dreamer and at least in fiction she could study the pyramids and skydive into the crater of dead volcanoes.

Yet when she proclaimed: “I’ll travel the world and know it firsthand! I’ll discover a new species of swamp-dwelling plant! I’ll sing in seven languages for people that understand none of them! I’ll be a local hero, the sort that brings back stories everyone pauses what they’re doing to listen to!”

Her mother merely nodded her head and the skin around her eyes crinkled as she bestowed her daughter with an encouraging smile.

“You’ll be all of that and more, my dear girl,” mother would say. “Oh, Paula, you’ll be someone that your father and I can scarcely imagine. You’ll do better and go farther than anyone in our family ever has. The world will call you to the wilderness and you won’t wait like I do in the town where you were born.”

Paula was not convinced, though it would’ve been nice to envision a future like her mother described. The issue was that by saying all those wonderful things her mother had essentially told her little, and Paula was a remarkably analytical girl with very clear goals plotted across the history of her life. Paula made plans with meticulous steps and was certain where they’d lead. Her mother flattered her with such ideas but Paula could not comprehend how it was possible without a solid hypothesis.

But as the story goes, the day did come when the world called, and maybe it was the grace of God, maybe it was the heart of the Earth crying out in pain, maybe it was the wounds of a boy lost in a forest with a baseball bat in his hand and blood dripping from his eyebrows –but the outcome was the same: without considering the fragility of her peaceful, everyday existence, she sprang from the sidelines to set fire to a pyre that would burn throughout history.

“I’ll be a nurse someday, mama,” Paula once said, and her mother performed one of her characteristic nods, then answered: “You’ll be a nurse all right, but not of the hospital type. You’ll be a nurse of different wounds, and you’ll work fulltime. Even in your dreams, you’ll sometimes feel the trickling of dread into a human heart and want to heal it.”

With the Star of David nestled between her palms, she knelt before the rising sun, lowering her head to touch Ness’s forehead. She felt the texture of blood mixed with perspiration, the warmth of a body pulsing with adrenaline, and the gentle, determined contractions that shifted the position of his chest as he struggled to breathe. Ness mustered a smile, half obscured by the deluge of his injuries, but his hands were shaking and Paula, who never flinched when her own fingers bruised, cringed.

She was saying, “I’m sorry. This is my fault. I didn’t see it sneak up on us. I was supposed to watch your back. But I let you get hurt like this. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

The ribbon in her hair had ceased being a bow. Blond curls stuck to her face as panic pounded in her temples, the heat beneath her skin reaching unbearable degrees. She scrambled to say more, but words were capsizing on her tongue, turning to saliva that she could merely swallow back down. Then she gasped at the mint light that filled her vision. She actually backed away to contemplate it, a sphere with the appearance of electricity that grew steadily until it burst into a flash a feeling –a feeling like watching a toddler take their first steps, like being caught by someone’s arms while falling, like being awakened by the kisses of her mother and that sweet, sing-along voice murmuring, “Honey, darling, it’s time to get up”– knocked the air out of her lungs.

And as a surrogate mother, as a temporary sister, as a newfound best friend, Paula fashioned bandages out of leaves and spider webs, placed them around the wounds that Ness’s power couldn’t immediately fix, and hummed an eight note melody she couldn’t recall learning.

Paula can play the piano. She can play the ocarina. She’s fluent in four languages and often messes up while addressing someone that’s only familiar with one of them. At night she invents constellations, then tells their stories as if she were merely reciting information she memorized from a text book. She’s a girl that can dance to any rhythm _and_ ensure that the least comfortable spectator in the room forgets their anxiety while partnered with her. She wraps ribbons around her cuts and hides bruises behind Band-Aids.

The term to describe her is hyper-empathy, and it’s defined as an acute perception of other people’s feelings grouped with experiencing those intense emotions as if they were the individual’s own. Paula simply knows it as “caring more than most.”

It’s unclear if she inherited this quirk from a biological makeup or developed it as a result of her upbringing, or if they were both edging the other on. Similar characteristics are present in her mother, but her feelings are much more centered, the extent of her everyday worries contained within the perimeter of her everyday life. Paula has traveled the world and contemplated the weight of her role in relation to the fate of the universe itself, as many tapestries of suffering laid out for her to mourn as there are sunsets cast over Earth. Paula can’t simply disregard this knowledge and perform every task as if her bones didn’t shake for someone a thousand miles away that she couldn’t save.

So she tries to make up for it, in little ways that hopefully add up. She removes her shoes while crossing flowerbeds, leaves dishes full of food outside her door for stray animals, ignores her rude classmates even though she has a perfect retort because the humiliation it’d invoke pain her as well. With her medical experience, she’s often tasked with persuading children to drink bitter medicine or accept an injection; and when she says, “This’ll hurt me more than it does you,” kids can tell she means it.

“There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” is a motto of her mother but Paula’s always thought that, while it doesn’t help, it’s only fair: sad things deserve to be acknowledged, experienced; there’s no lonelier feeling than “no one can understand how this feels,” and she does, she does understand. It’s her gift and her responsibility.

Not everyone can be saved but she’s tried her best. Tries her best. Whether it’s a stubborn gesture begging to be seen through or an honest, open plea for assistance, she’s listening.

And suddenly, in the most unexpected of places –in the safest of places–, she’s overwhelmed by the notion that nothing she’s accomplished gains meaning until she settles the occasions where she failed. Everyone has demons that haunt them.

With mud-caked boots, she once ventured near a stream to have them cleansed. However, the current ensnared one and it sank beyond reach, a mass of diluted yellow disappearing beneath the layers of acrylic blue. Turning her gaze towards the sky, she noticed it was evening. The sun was splitting open its stomach and strewing red entrails everywhere.

A six year old child stumbled through the field to reach her. Paint stained his fingers, viridian and gold and violet. Bits of it rubbed off on her skirt as they tugged, demanding her attention with distressed cries, a symphony of, “Help me, Paula. Help me.”

It was a strange experience because she’s never been afraid of fire. Fire is an element she tamed, channeled through her veins and put out with a glance. But the sight of the sky, like a blazing sea extending into infinity, was vast and uncontainable. No borders pressed the color into uniformity: it leaked and dribbled and poured, contamination spreading across a clean surface, corroding and corrupting.

Then the tapestry of the universe unfurled and the beating, gnashing wings of a cosmic destroyer burst through her bones. Not outside but inside. People tell her she’s fine because this is a different place, a different time, but she carries the wreckage of that calamity in her mind and it can smell weakness before it surfaces, pitch coils blocking her throat, the oxygen flow stopped. All it takes is a trickle of tar for her vessel to sink.

On her knees, the shrieking would bubble but not burst. Her vision transfixed upon a mutating shape, unwinding and reassembling, she was terrified that even a mutter would accelerate the process. The child couldn’t perceive her dread or the source of it: he merely gripped her tighter, leaning closer, speaking louder, faster –vibrant and nostalgic, like murmurs of waves caught in a shell.

“Help me. Help me, Paula,” he kept shouting. Paula lifted her hands over her head to protect herself from an invisible, impenetrable force.

H E L P M E

She could hear it everywhere: from above her head, between her fingers, right next to her shoulder. It frightened her and she tried to shake it off, but to her surprise it was her own body that broke. Her hand dislocated. There’s an absence where her hip existed. All her articulations had become numb. That’s right. She remembered then: none of that was there when it happened. Her body didn’t even exist. When she tried to throw it away, it disappeared, devoured by the teeth of a humongous red planet.

H E L P M E , the static screeched, not a voice but a sensation, like holding someone’s hand while they dangle from a cliff side, like watching a building catch fire. Her instinct was to run yet the space was composed of a consistent infinity, a perfect loop that spun her in circles, leading nowhere with any distinction from where she started. And that creature was always there, bright and glaring, suspended before her as if it were the headlights of a car right before impact. However, the blow never arrived –there was no jolt that sent her flying, tearing open her skin, breaking her ribs and her lungs. The anxiety of anticipation kept her paralyzed. It was a tragedy stuck on the first act, with no release, no room to even _breathe_.

Crushed. Consumed. Deconstructed, then digested. Her energy absorbed by something else, something with a bottomless appetite. It couldn’t be satisfied, and it served no purpose. Hypothetically speaking, someday the universe will run out of energy and only warmth will remain. That’s what it was doing, but much faster. The warmth, too, would seep through its cracks and be engulfed, exchanged for pure void.

H E L P M E , P A U L A

She couldn’t cry when it actually happened but there, conquered by the delusion, she had the opportunity. Her features scrunched up with despair, shaking all over. Everything was happening too fast, yet without a sense of conclusion. It was just a never-ending build up. A tantrum without consequences. Bark and no bite, but the threat was tormenting enough.

“I can’t!” she shrieked, “I can’t help you! Whomever you are, I can’t help you!”

There was sobbing. Then she was hyperventilating, coughing. Somehow it was more vivid the second time. The static continued to snarl. Her heartbeat synchronized, magnified. There was that hyper-empathy again.

H E L P M E

To this day she thinks about it. “I want to help you,” turning into “I can’t help you,” prompting apologies, a lifetime of regret and guilt and inadequacy. “I couldn’t save someone that really needed it,” she tells herself. “I prayed for death so it’d be over. That was the next best thing. I couldn’t save it so I prayed for its death.”

“God won’t give you more than you can handle,” but that doesn’t mean handling it doesn’t hurt.

It’s her responsibility. She’s the one to carry the weight of cosmic murder.

* * *

 

Her hair is wet with melted snowflakes. The boots around her feet are glazed with ice. She tried to wipe them clean at the entrance but a trail of petit footprints still followed her into the building. Swinging her legs back and forth to relieve some anxiety, she apologizes to Jeff for the mess she’s made.

Jeff offers comfort through a lopsided grin, assuring her that the floor of the lab is never clean to begin with. He’s fiddling with a triangular device propped on his lap, picking out tiny pieces and exchanging them in his pockets for different ones. Without lifting his gaze from it, he tells Paula that his father should be ready to see her soon.

Placing her hands on her knees, Paula leans closer, curiously observing his work. She doesn’t mean to disturb him but he discerns her interest and holds it up so she can get a better view of it. The frame is mechanical but in the center there’s a gap where a light glows on and off.

Jeff seizes the moment to ask her about the ribbon wrapped around her ankle. Paula’s surprised he noticed. Embarrassed, she knocks her feet together, then tells him that she slipped on some ice while on her way here and had to tie her bow around it. He offers to bandage it up, to which she politely declines by saying that it’s just a little bruise.

“Sorry for making you wait,” a voice addresses her, deep and tired but with an affectionate edge.

Reflexively, Paula stands, extending her hand for Dr. Andonuts to shake. He clasps both hands around it, his mouth splitting into a broad smile. He nods at his son, who is back to focusing on the device and only lifts an arm to wave.

“It’s good to see you,” Paula says, trying to mirror his enthusiasm.

Andonuts, however, perceives her distress and furrows his eyebrows with concern.

“Over the phone, you said only that you’d visit, but not to what I owed it,” he says. “How can I help you?”

Paula turns towards the ground, fear suddenly ensnaring her chest like a bush of thorny vines. Intense emotions that she’s kept stored are thawing free and making her face hot. She can feel a sliver of tears pushing through the corners of her eyes like weeds against the weight of concrete.

“Well,” she mumbles, deep breaths attempting to assimilate the strength to proceed. Her thumbs fidget against her other fingers. “I know this is likely impossible… in fact, I’m almost certain… but I really must ask, for the sake of my peace of my mind…”

Andonuts waits patiently for her to continue. Jeff turns a knob on the device and then lifts his head, pressing his glasses closer to his face. He’s here just in case.

Paula cranes her face in a way that she hopes will keep them from seeing the sadness in it. Her injured ankle starts to prickle.

“Regarding our journey,” the psychic girl says. She chooses each word carefully from her experience as a writing workshop leader. “The one into the past. Back then, we were able to change something that had technically already happened, so it wouldn’t happen.”

Paula steadies her gaze so she can look at Andonuts directly. A determined glint has emerged from the black holes of her eyes.

“Is there any way that can be done again? With the phase distorter still intact, could we, could I go back again?”

Andonut’s expression darkens as she speaks, apprehension turning to bewilderment and then settling for pity.

“No,” the inventor says. “I’m afraid that’s quite impossible. I could go into the scientific details as to why but I don’t think you’re interested in that. The bottom line is that it can’t be done. Plus, what you’re thinking of could have historical repercussions that we’d be better off not risking.”

Seen straight through, Paula has nothing else to add. She expresses her understanding by nodding. Her shoulders are only gently shivering.

“Yes. Of course. I knew that,” she says between breaths that sound more like gasps. “But I still had to ask. To hear it. To be at peace with it.”

Jeff stands up, shoving the whole device into his breast pocket. He pulls out a thin square of glass that looks like it belongs underneath a microscope. He nudges Paula with his nearest elbow.

“Hey, I want to show you something,” Jeff says. “Come with me to Stonehenge, okay?”

Outside the wind ruffles their clothes and it’s snowing harder than before so Paula can feel a distinct chill settling across her skin. She tries to keep her teeth from chattering while Jeff holds the glass square midair, catching some of the descending snowflakes. Then he stands right beside her, the glass between both their hands.

“See that?” Jeff asks, and Paula does: a whole tapestry of miniature flakes engraving their unique shapes into the glass.

“It’s beautiful,” says Paula, smiling a tiny bit because she can never help being deeply moved by nature.

Jeff presses one of his index fingers to the glass and when he removes it the snowflakes have melted, leaving a wet and unremarkable shape. Paula gasps.

“Snowflakes perish pretty quickly. It’s inevitable. But they were still beautiful, don’t you think? While they lasted. You can always remember them at their best,” Jeff says. There is no emotional influx in his voice and yet Paula can detect some warmth emanating from this wisdom.

Her smile broadens, still with a twang of melancholy but on its way to recovery. She looks at Jeff, but he’s fixated on the glass. His lenses are caked with crystals.

“There’s so many, and they’re all unique. They look the same from the distance but that’s just a matter of perception. A misconception,” says Jeff. “Even if we can’t prolong their stay, we hold onto them for a moment to try to understand what makes them so diverse.”

Jeff extends the glass again, then places it in the palm of Paula’s hand. New flakes are scattered across the translucent surface. He steps away from her.

“Think about that when you’re sad. So many things remain safe in your memory,” he says while sitting down on the cold, damp snow. It’s like he’s so used to living in perpetual winter that he doesn’t mind his pants getting soaked.

Unexpectedly, his tone gains the distinct edge of concern: “Don’t be so hard on yourself for not saving Giygas. Not everything can stay. For all its screaming and thrashing, I’m sure it wasn’t suffering at the end. You were praying for its safe passage, after all.”

Paula flops down next to him. She doesn’t answer but she’s sure she doesn’t have to. Enough appreciation is embedded into her expression. The one thing she does do is take Jeff’s hand and fall on her back, dragging him down with her. They lie, motionless except for their breathing, for a moment and then Paula lifts her arms above Jeff’s head and he has to roll away to avoid being pelted in snow.

They make snow angels before returning to the lab.


End file.
